


the flowers grow between

by killdoll



Category: Code Geass
Genre: (for a while anyway), Abuse, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Cults, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, F/M, I'll tag characters as I actually post the chapters they appear in, M/M, Multi, Past Child Abuse, gratuitous bastardizations of the game of chess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-20
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-06-13 15:11:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15367344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/killdoll/pseuds/killdoll
Summary: Young writer Lelouch Lamperouge was sure he'd escaped the clutches of his dysfunctional extended family. Unfortunately, things aren't as simple as they seem. Suzalulu, modern AU. (Previously titledhappiness in the face of incredible trauma!)





	1. Chapter 1

_“Let us then determine what are the circumstances which strike us as terrible or pitiful.”_

 

N the sixth of September, 2008, ten years before Suzaku Kururugi would commit his first and only homicide, Lelouch Lamperouge flew headlong into the arms of Ashford University with almost nothing but the clothes on his back.

There was nothing keeping him home. Not anymore.

The airplane thermometer nailed to the backdoor of the shed read thirty-five degrees when he passed it briefly. He was dressed in a black Tommy Hilfiger turtleneck, a dark red Ralph Lauren down vest, designer jeans, and black hiking boots he’d never worn before. Random clothes he’d thrown together from his closet. In his suitcase was more of the same: expensive clothes he’d been raised to take for granted.

Moisture hung cold in the air like failure. The mountain was a sharp bite cooler than he was used to for the time of year, and when he stopped to catch his breath, he rubbed his hands together, blowing warm onto his numbing fingertips.

(He tried running for a bit, at first. That didn’t work out. So he walked.)

Once he stumbled past the tree line, Lelouch was able to breathe easier. Still, he would have to descend on foot, something he’d never done on his own. At the bottom of the mountain, the highway stretched out like an open scroll, fecund with possibility. Here the ground was uneven and, in the morning half-dark, treacherous.

Gently, gingerly down the mountain. Careful now; a misplaced footstep could mean a dislocated ankle. Time sleepily shook its head, and the sunrise fed itself piece by piece through the sky, a watery orange that fell pale over the lush, forest-black mountains. Light felt the landscape out; vague gray shapes gained specificity. The wild columbine stretched its limbs; flat daisies speckled the ground like scallops’ eyes. Everywhere the trail stopped, in curlicues around Lelouch’s feet, bushes of raspberry and honeysuckle, white Lowrie’s aster and rattlesnake root, bloodroot and silverrod and goldenrod and wild bergamot frothed and spilled and flowered forth across the eddying ground.

His breath scourged in his lungs, but every step he took took him further from the hell of his childhood home. When he looked over his shoulder, just once, to see if he was being followed — he wasn’t — the place he’d left was a set of dollhouses, perched on that hill like a dead giant’s head.

Ashford University was a private institution, one that remained curiously obscure despite its considerable history, located in the middle of a cornfield in Wilson County, Kansas, miles away from Wichita or Topeka.

The isolated campus lay on an oddly formed plot of earth something like a cross between a hill and a plateau. You could stand near the edge of the school grounds, shade your eyes with a hand, and see for miles and miles— though depending which direction you looked, there was a good chance you’d see nothing but flat land, a simple horizon as eerily closed off as a misdrawn circle. Some illusion of the plains made everything you did see out there look a little zoomed up, somehow both sharp and blurry like a fleck of color in an oil painting.

Evening came late with its coat of darkness, and sometimes, when it was very quiet, the hoot of a short-eared owl would break the night open, and you’d shiver, remembering that you were never truly alone out there.

Cream and blue houses dotted the plain like delicate, painted music boxes. There was land for grazing cattle, and sometimes you did see cows roaming. They looked larger in the distance than they really were, slow moving shapes Bosch-brown in midday sunlight, pond-bottom mud in the hazy indigo dusk. Sometimes you saw just their eyes, two flecks of light like signal flares where the moon bounced off them. But mostly it was you, the brick cones and squares of the school, and the prairie.

Ashford was on the smallish side, as far as liberal arts academies went, but it wasn’t a bad school by any means, merely an accident of location. There were bio majors, philosophy majors, English majors.  There were introductory classes in Latin, Spanish, German, and French. There was shale exposed where the ground was raw. There was an ocean of grass waist-high, fit to choke bikes, books, and bodies. Wild sunflowers grew in profusion; under windowsills, crawling over and around doorframes and baseboards, jutting out of interstices with their dumb happy faces, missing petals like little children missing teeth.

In September of 2008, Suzaku Kururugi was a freshman at Ashford. He was majoring in biology because he wanted to be a veterinarian someday, and he was going to school in Kansas because he wanted a fresh start. He took a plane from NYC and wouldn’t be coming back until Christmas. His mother cried the whole way to the airport— it was Suzaku’s first time traveling by plane, and she was worried sick. He kissed her cheek, told her she had nothing to worry about. He felt stateless and exploratory, a brave soldier journeying to foreign lands.

Suzaku thought he was ready for Kansas. He was not. Not prepared for the quietness, for the insanity of the vast treeless landscape. The sky so full of stars and endless he felt like a goldfish in a bowl. On the day of orientation, heat clung to the ground, bleaching the grass white, and while he hugged his folder to his chest, the surrealism of the situation rushed up on him all at once. He was infinitely more alone in the close-knit stream of fish than he had ever been even in the often all-too-isolating crowds of his hometown.

That first night, he pined silently for his own room, his own bed. His roommate Gino asked him if he’d ever heard of Blink 182, as if he was from the moon instead of just New York. Maybe Suzaku was. Staring at bedsprings from the bottom bunk, Suzaku laid awake to bright lights and Enema of the State thrumming through the walls at full blast until the R. A. knocked on the door at 2 A. M., literally begging for quiet. Gino was sheepish about it. “Sorry,” he said. “It helps my anxiety.”

Lelouch hitchhiked.

And walked, and took the greyhound bus.

His plan was simply to get as far away from New York as possible, maybe all the way to California. Once he’d put enough distance between himself and his family, he would figure out what to do next. Acting without a plan was unlike him, but then he hadn’t been thinking clearly. Ever since he was very young, whenever terrible things happened, a veil came over Lelouch’s mind, and he felt as though he was watching everything unfold from a vantage point on the ceiling. His body became a strange puppet. In a gas station bathroom he brought his hands up to his face, stood still in front of the mirror, and stared.

Dying for real food, he stopped along a highway in Indiana to spend a little bit of money on a disgusting grease-soaked hunk of hashbrowns. He bought energy bars and Mountain Dews at 24-hour country truck stops and ate them as the time zone straddled midnight, standing in the moth ridden puddle cast by a streetlight and staring emptily up at the star-pocked sky.

He prioritized travel. Even someone as strangely sheltered as himself had grown up hearing horror stories about serial killers prowling the interstate highways, so he was wary of hitchhiking, but at the same time, he didn’t have much in the way of other options. As his journey progressed, he came to expect to wind up tits up in a ditch, even made peace with the prospect. He washed up in public restrooms and did his best not to look homeless, although he realized with a growing dread in his gut that homeless was what he’d become.

Lelouch wasn’t sure if they were following him. If they were, they hadn’t given any sign.

He caught rides from college students and hippies and weirdos and did his best to stick with people who looked at least half as lost as he did. He tagged along with a man who had a niece’s ½ scale stuffed giraffe crammed into the back seat and a little old lady with her bluish hair set in rollers who he accidentally charmed out of a pack of Mentos, twenty US dollars and a Canadian quarter. On day three, clouds rolled in and rain speckled the windshield. The horizon Lelouch stared down looked impossibly gray and flat.

When it came time to trade stories, he developed an idyllic childhood mythos straight out of thin air: ice cold strawberry lemonades and Cape Cod cabins, blackberries ripened to burst in the hot precious sunlight of the New England summer. Relatives who sizzled into existence in red hot copper wires as soon as he spoke them so, his eyes boring hard into the gray seatbacks of the vehicles of stranger after stranger. Amazing, he thought with a twist of irony, what his mouth could do, when he really tried.

Gino was… it wasn’t that he was a bad guy. He meant well; in fact, Suzaku felt a twinge of guilt in his stomach (an all-too-familiar feeling, for him) for finding him as annoying as he did. Say it like this: when Suzaku first walked into their room, Gino dropped his bags and his jaw, eyeballs popping, and said “Whoa! Where are you from?” and when Suzaku told him New York, he said “Yeah yeah, but like, where are you _from_ from?”

Gino’s gaffes only gained egregiousness from there. His airheadedness did not limit itself to racial insensitivity, either; a dunce of all trades, Gino was profoundly stupid in every way possible, and even some ways that weren’t. He was a walking contradiction in that he generally smelled okay but was proud owner to not one, not even two, but three of the rattiest rattails Suzaku had ever seen in his eighteen years of life. Headphones and an MP3 player solved the problem of the first night but Gino quickly moved on to humming, loudly, especially when Suzaku was trying to study. He’d apparently been a jock in high school and could have gotten a football scholarship to K-state or somewhere else ( _anywhere_ else), but he was here because his house was a twenty-minute drive and his parents were loaded. Suzaku gleaned this from listening to Gino talk about himself, something Gino absolutely loved to do, while Suzaku laid on his own neatly made bed, leafing through the student handbook papers in the binder he’d received at orientation. Gino’s mouth kept running, and Suzaku kept losing his place in what he read.

“So do you play any sports?” Gino suddenly interrupted himself to ask. He hung half off the bed, staring at Suzaku upside down. Suzaku forced himself to smile.

“I was on the track team,” he said. “We made it all the way to state one year, but then we lost. The other team was insane.” That was a big fat lie, and Suzaku felt guilty about it, but he was also responding on autopilot because he didn't want to drag this conversation out any longer than he had to. Suzaku was naturally athletic, but his passion had been for aikido, not running.

“Oh,” said Gino. “No football?”

“No football.”

“Oh,” said Gino, “Huh. I was thinking if anything you’d do karate or something.”

The first Sunday that Suzaku was moved in, he was scheduled to meet family that he had in the state, namely Kaguya and her assorted parents and siblings. They picked him up from his dorm (half-unpacked, Gino rocking out, door held open with a doorstop, Suzaku in the grips of abject misery) and drove him to a Starbucks in Neodesha. The SUV was air-conditioned, and Kaguya was the way she always was, cheerfully intrusive. After making his way through the matcha frap and chocolate chip cookie he diffidently accepted, Suzaku found himself invited out to the parking lot. His aunt led him to a charcoal gray pickup, gleaming in the sun. There was a dent in the fender, and the truck was clearly not new, but not in the worst condition either, and it had clearly recently been through a car wash. Suzaku could see through the windows that the inside had been cleaned. He would later learn that the inside kind of smelled like ketchup and he would never be able to get rid of that smell, but who cared? At first, he didn’t understand what was going on.

“This is a nice truck?” Suzaku said.

“It’s yours,” said his aunt.

Suzaku laughed.

“No it’s not,” he said, “you drove me here, you know that.”

His aunt grinned, tucked a crimped lock of hair behind her ear. Realization dawned on Suzaku slowly.

“Wait,” he said.

“This was going to be Kaguya’s, but she’s got a part-time job and she’s saving up for something else,” his aunt said. “I thought it would be a shame to have you stranded down here without a car when we had a perfectly good one just sitting in the garage.”

“Are you serious?” Suzaku asked. His aunt nodded again.

The tiniest salvation! Mobility rolled out in front of Suzaku like a long and winding road.

The days blurred into each other. For Lelouch, New York got further and further away. He traced a road map in a gas station, calculating his route and sipping lukewarm coffee black. Dawn’s rosy fingers creepy-crawled up across the sky.

He hadn’t thought this through. Did he have any skills? He had his G. E. D. at least. Homeschooled, like almost all the children of the Kindred, except Schneizel, fucking Schneizel. Could he even make money doing honest work? He told himself he could, but could he? Didn’t people just want to fuck him?

He felt kind of sick.

Lelouch threw up his coffee in the gas station bathroom. There he was on the ceiling again. He saw himself run his fingers through his hair, trying to grab hold of his own balloon strings. He flushed the toilet and then suddenly had one hand on the sink, staring himself in the eyes through a smudged handprint on the dirty mirror. He looked a mess.

He brushed his teeth. He didn’t think about it.

He went out front to hitch another ride.

The whole plan was foolish, Lelouch realized somewhere on a western Missouri highway, in the backseat of a car that smelled of salt-and-vinegar potato chips and vomit. This was the way the thought finally congealed, sticky, molassine, and inimical, vampirically fixing itself to his brain stem and sucking away there while he stared at his jean-clad thighs. He was going to have to go back home. He was going to have to go back to his family and beg them to take him back after he’d personally run away, run away with a backpack full of disposable razors and deodorant sticks and clean socks and a wallet with his secret life savings of all of $500, get down on his hands and knees in front of his father and beg them to take him back after he’d abandoned them, him, a failure who’d practically killed two of his own sisters through sheer lack of responsibility, would have to—

“Whoa, dude, are you okay?” asked the driver. He was watching him in the rear view mirror. Lelouch realized he’d been zoning out. He looked up.

“Oh, yes,” he said. He was careful. He put a smile on. “Just thinking.”

At 7:56 A. M. on Wednesday, the 10th of September, 2008, four days after the dark morning Lelouch had stolen away from home, Suzaku was deeply regretting his choice of a lecture class that met at 8 A. M. He, who almost never overslept, had been kept up by guess who until the early morning and had crashed right through his alarm, and was now sprinting from one end of campus to the other. His sweatshirt was on backwards, his socks were mismatched.

They smacked into each other and went spinning in opposite directions like cue balls.

Bam. Lelouch was down, laid out in the beardgrass like making a snow angel. Suzaku was mostly disoriented. The momentum of their joining and parting knocked him a good few feet back on his path, and for a moment he literally didn’t know what had hit him. It wasn’t until he looked down that he realized he had apparently just killed the preppiest vampire in the entire world with the sheer hardness of his head.

“Oh my God,” Suzaku said, staggering over, “I’m so sorry, are you okay?”

No response. Panicking, future-med-student Suzaku knelt and checked if he was breathing— oh, he was, thank God. He said “Thank God” out loud, and the mysterious boy’s eyelids fluttered, hazy eyes coming to focus on him.

Translucent-skinned mystery-waif regarded him, and the moment felt important in a way Suzaku couldn’t explain, so he held his breath and kept still, said nothing.

Then the boy’s features shifted into an odd little smile, and he said, drowsily, one word: “Heaven.” Then his head lolled to the side, his eyelids slid closed, and he was out again.

Suzaku knelt to examine his charge. A gleam of something against the soft morning light caught his eye: clasped around the boy’s neck, a silver locket with a raised cross design embossed onto its surface. Ah. Not a vampire, then.

Gosh, Suzaku hoped he was okay.

His stomach twisted with a sudden rain of ice-cold guilt; had he got someone hurt? Again? Stupid, like it wasn’t enough the first time.

But no. Suzaku had to act in the moment. There was no one else around; they were all either in class or asleep. Alright then, Suzaku would carry the boy to the school nurse himself.

Guilt played marimba on his ribcage as he made the trip; he really hoped he hadn’t injured this kid too seriously. Kid was light enough that Suzaku could half-jog while carrying him, which didn’t bode well. Was he a student? Suzaku didn’t recognize him. Lack of consciousness sounded like a concussion to him. He hated concussions.

Lelouch’s passing out actually had more to do with the sleep deprivation and malnutrition of his past few days than their collision, but Suzaku didn’t know that.

The bell over the door tinkled as Suzaku tucked his shoulders into the nurse’s office, struggling to make all of his charge fit through the doorframe. “Come in, dearie,” the school nurse said from his computer. Doctor Lloyd Asplund was flamboyant and eccentric, prone to contorting his eel-like body into grotesque sitting positions. Lloyd, who had been sitting with his back to the door, twisted in the chair. His mouth formed an “O”.

Suzaku was stuck. Technically, Lelouch was stuck. His ankles. Beanpole angel. “Hi,” Suzaku said.

Lloyd put his hands on the desk and leaned out of his chair, cocking his head to the back door. “Cecile! We have a situation!”

Lelouch’s body was a church of pain. His head was the steeple, and the bell was his tongue, which he’d bit when he’d gone down. He woke to the bright cherry Kool-Aid of blood in his mouth. He coughed and decorated his chest with flecks of red, beads of saliva-dissolved bloodspittle.

“Oh— Lloyd!” came a feminine voice. Lelouch’s heart kicked itself into overdrive, shook him awake, sped blood to his brain, told him look alive, you need to analyze your options, you need to predict and prepare the best route for escape, you need to—

The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak. First of all, he still couldn’t see, though, he realized faintly, that was changing. Light seeped into the darkness slowly, the world returning in pockets and starbursts, hovering and dancing and often sliding away and leaving dark afterimages before his eyes. He was sitting half-upright in something— reclined, rather, incumbit. The room seemed white.

There were indistinct voices like shuffling in front of a blackboard. Lelouch fell asleep again.

This sleep was not dreamless, and his dreams were not kind. Lelouch, at that time in his life, did not know that dreams or people could be kind. Later, he would meet people with kindnesses so deep they shore straight to the bone, people whose kindnesses devoured them; he would come to understand that some people’s kindness swallows them whole.

But until then, Lelouch thought, with only a single exception, he had only known beautiful selfish people, beautiful selfish actions, and beautiful selfish words. He had known only beautiful things with pale oozing undersides. He knew nothing sweet or pure. And all his dreams were beautiful and cruel.

In the school nurse’s office that day, hovering in the liminal space, asleep like this, awake over here, here is what Lelouch dreamed:

There was a room, in the Aries villa, where he and Nunnally and Euphie often played all together, just the three. That room was perfect. It was not too big or too small and on the first floor and it was not used for anything. The back door led into it but no one ever used that door. There was no furniture inside it beyond a single card table with a green laminate tablecloth thrown over it to keep safe from dust. Because that tablecloth reached all the way down to the floor, under the table became a magic place, safe from monsters both real and imagined.

The children played house there. Lelouch was always the mommy, Euphemia the daddy and Nunnally was the baby. The three always reveled in their secret rulebreaking, their eschewing of the gender roles that staunchly governed the home where they were growing up.

He had been asleep during the fire, but in his dream Lelouch saw the building blaze. Nunnally spoke to him, but he could not hear what she was saying, nor could he read her lips.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” said Lloyd. Lelouch was twitching awake. This time, his mouth felt full of sleep, not blood. He didn’t cough, even though the room smelled like chemicals. “Look at this light.”

The nurse waved a platinum pen light in front of Lelouch’s face. Lelouch’s pupils followed the beam. “You are not concussed!” declared Lloyd, sailing across the tiled floor in his rolling chair. “But you are probably dehydrated. Drink some water. Cecile, get him some water.”

Cecile brought him tepid water in a plastic cup, apologizing profusely under her breath for the mannerisms of her superior. “Thank you,” Lelouch said. His voice was hoarse after going so long without use. He sipped, blinking. He appeared to be in some kind of doctor’s office. “Where am I?”

“You’re at the nurse’s office, kid,” Lloyd replied. “Open your mouth.”

Lelouch did as he was told; Lloyd pressed his tongue down with a tongue depressor. He gagged. He sipped more water. “I gathered,” Lelouch said, “but which nurse’s office?”

“You’re not a student? Well, that explains why you didn’t have any student I. D. on you. You’ve washed up on the shores of Ashford University, kid.”

Lelouch frowned like he’d swallowed cough syrup. Lloyd clapped him on the back, then skated back to enter something into his computer in the opposite corner of the room. When he spoke to Lelouch next, it was over the clacking of keys. “Your blood sugar’s probably low too. You want some teddy grahams? Hey,” he said suddenly, stopping typing to turn around and look at Lelouch appraisingly over the top of his glasses, “how did you get here, anyway?”

Lelouch did not respond to the barrage of questions, though, because he was reading a poster on the wall, the plastic cup pressed halfway to his lips like a forgotten prayer. The blue and orange ink made the print stand out, almost the only drop of color in what suddenly seemed like a drab room. He mouthed one of the words in the title against the rim, because it was a word he’d never heard before, because somewhere where it laid forgotten in his ribcage hope like hummingbird wings was suddenly whirring:

scholarship.

The next day, Suzaku came by, inquiring after the fate of the boy he’d brought in, guilty he’d had to run off to make class.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure he goes here now,” Lloyd replied.

Suzaku spat out his coffee. “He _goes_ here?!”

Lelouch’s knight in shining armor melted into the shadows without leaving him so much as his name, but the upshot of it all was that within 48 hours, Lelouch had a place to stay. He sat down at one of the library computers and in five hours wrote an essay that not only won him a place at Ashford, but a full ride with room and board paid to boot.

It all made such perfect sense, in Lelouch’s mind; where was the last place in the world that his family would look for him? They would search high and low the natural landscapes of San Fran and L. A., all the big West Coast cities, looking for him in the teeth of skyscrapers and the throats of alleyways, but never here, at a middle-of-nowhere, run-of-the-mill school in Kansas, for Christ’s sake. Besides, if they hadn’t caught him by now he wasn’t sure that they’d even come looking for him. Maybe they really didn’t want anything to do with him anymore, maybe they were finally taking his renouncements of the family name seriously, maybe Charlie had finally disowned him. The thought brought him cold comfort.

There was someone else in the room on campus where Lelouch was supposed to stay. When he informed Housing of the mix-up, he learned that this was, in fact, the custom, and that this person was his new roommate.

When Lelouch dragged his prim black suitcase into the room for the second time, the doors and windows alike were thrown wide open to let the fresh air in. The boy from before was facing away from the door, plugged into a pale cream cube of a computer with Facebook and WinAmp pulled up. A pair of stocky, coal-black headphones were clamped over his ears, the kind with noise-cancelling cushioning that billowed out around the rim like a ring of fat, and he didn’t notice Lelouch come in. Lelouch took advantage of the situation to, for the first time, do something he had been trained to do on sight: take stock of his new surroundings.

His now-roommate had already succeeded in making a fantastic mess of the place. Lelouch blinked once, twice as he took in the subtle disarray; it was one of those messes that doesn’t reveal the intricacies of its many working parts without proper scrutiny. The free space on the desk next to the computer was piled up with used paper cups, plates, and ramen noodle packaging. Dirty laundry was scattered around the room, apparently where it was discarded, without any thought for cleanliness; a plain white plastic-and-canvas hamper, probably bought wishfully by a mother or aunt, sat empty and dejected in the corner. One of the two twin beds in the room was completely stripped; the other was fitted out with (rumpled) mauve bedding. Two small free-hanging shelves had been attached to the wall above the dressed bed, one of which displayed a tennis racket and the the other some miscellaneous medals and trophies. On the other wall adjacent to the bed was hung a burgundy tapestry emblazoned in gold with what Lelouch could only assume were the other boy’s high school mascot and slogan (a stylized tiger, followed by the incredibly creative “Go Tigers!”). Lelouch dropped his bags on the bare mattress, and the boy finally pulled his headphones off and turned around.

“Oh, hey!” the other boy said, and Lelouch, who was turned around, jumped. “Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,” the boy said. He was walking toward Lelouch. Lelouch focused enough to force on a smile.

“Hi, I’m Rivalz Cardemonde,” he said. He put his thumbs in his pockets and leaned back, looking at Lelouch appraisingly. “I guess you’re my new roommate.”

Lelouch looked at his new bed, bare of everything but an uncomfortable-looking mattress. “I guess."

It had been two weeks since Lelouch’s inadvertent absorption into the higher pedagogical machine, and so far he’d spent most of them marveling over how all he was expected to do was read and study— two of the things he loved the most. In his childhood, both had been forbidden, and twice now Rivalz had walked in on Lelouch literally hiding in the closet to read. Old habits died hard. To think that he could do it whenever he wanted, out in the open— it was practically sinful.

Lelouch and Rivalz’s suite had a bathroom with a mirror, sink, tub, and shower. It was the first year that the university gave its freshmen suites with individual bathrooms, and it would be the last. But that would not be Rivalz and Lelouch’s— well, it wouldn’t be Lelouch’s fault. He kept their mirror wiped, their sink scrubbed, their toilet unclogged and plunged.

The seniors who had inhabited the suite last year had left life-sized waterproof sunflower-shaped plastic stickers on the tower of coffee-beige tile that shot up around the tub and under the showerhead. For whatever reason, perhaps owing to the touch of human warmth they lent the otherwise sterile room, the summer cleaning crew had left them intact. Baths quickly became Lelouch’s oasis when he needed time away from Rivalz. Conversing with him was pleasant enough, but something about it always left Lelouch feeling oddly empty and fake, and when the mask felt caked around his features like mud, he locked himself in the restroom and filled the tub.

He liked his bathwater hot-hot, almost enough to scald, and deep enough that he could slump down until his knobby red knees just barely broke the surface, submerge the lower half of his face so that each sigh of relief blew bubbles in the water. His hair floated away from his neck like black tussocks of Spanish moss. He looked an acherontic Ogopogo, a shaggy-maned sea monster turned lobster by the tub, but life was no longer doom and gloom.

Lelouch enjoyed his classes, was doing well in school (in spite of skipping class to study on his own). He wasn’t the type to let his guard down, but he was starting to relax a little bit, at least the way a rabbit relaxes. Alert, ready to run, but grateful for the moment of safety, or at least the appearance of such.

This wasn’t to say it was easy. Lelouch had nightmares even when he was awake. He hated going to sleep because he never knew if he was going to lie down, close his eyes, and see everything happening all over again. He tried his best to put the events of those days as far from his mind as possible but he was stuck, he closed his eyes and counted backwards from one hundred and thought about what his feet were touching, where his hands were, he told himself it wasn’t going to happen again but his brain didn’t believe him.

His whole life Lelouch had been afraid, and once he didn’t have to be he didn’t know how not to be. He hadn’t believed in years, but the looming face of God was one form his past took. It followed him everywhere, eyes glittery and cold with resentment and judgment in equal measure, and when Lelouch tried to sleep he would clench his fists so tight his fingernails dug into his palms but he still couldn’t smother the little voice coming from under his pillow that whispered _you survived that house, but your sisters didn’t, did they?_

He hated being alone because the visions came, but he loved it because he was free to cry out, knock things over, pummel the wall with his weak fists and split his knuckles and watch the bright red ooze out in lazy pulsing rivers over lambskin-white, bury his head in his knees and mutter to himself over and over _you are here, you are here, you are here._

(He hated it, he hated that he was finally letting himself be happy when Nunnally was dead— God, how could he?)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was edited by [Jay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaystrifes/pseuds/jaystrifes)!


	2. Chapter 2

A rainbow hung by fishing line from the brick arcade out front of the university library; one that, if inspected with a more discerning eye, showed to in fact be a mosaic of many neon-colored post-it notes. This detail— along with the broader fact that the season was gradually dying the campus grounds pumpkin colors— Lelouch ignored, his nose buried in a book. In fact, a snap of cold wind picked a single piece of paper from his plain white three-ring binder, tugged it loose, and sent it tumbling away through the open air, and even this went unnoticed; Lelouch was too wrapped up in his poetry. He mouthed along with the words silently, figuring out how they tasted on his tongue.  

When Lelouch arrived at his dorm that evening, he had something to ask Rivalz, who was playing video games on his bed with the volume turned up obnoxiously loud.

“You’re late,” Rivalz said as Lelouch walked in. “Did Sophie stand you up this time as revenge?”

Lelouch flushed. Yes, that was the other thing about the outside world: a great many women were horribly interested in him. Two weeks and he’d already succeeded in disappointing a few; he knew of no polite way to tell them he wasn’t interested. “I asked you to quit bringing that up,” he said. “I have a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

He pulled his Blackberry out of his bag, pulled a photo up on the screen, and threw it in Rivalz’s direction. “Do you recognize this person?”

It was a blurry pic of some guy in a red tracksuit running. “Dude, is this a creepshot?” Rivalz asked. He held the phone out at arm’s length and upside down, squinting at the fuzzy picture.

“Oh, God, is that creepy?”

“To take a photo of someone without them knowing? Uh, yeah. Here, delete it." He handed the phone back to Lelouch, who scrambled to do so. “Anyway, no, I don’t know who that is. I probably couldn’t recognize anyone from a photo like that.”

“What?” said Lelouch, trying (and failing) to keep the undertone of a petulant whine out of his voice. “But you know everyone on campus.”

“You overestimate my active memory recall, Mister English Major,” Rivalz said. Lelouch blanched; right. Rivalz wasn’t really the academic type. He didn’t even have a major yet. He rolled over, returning to his game. “But, hey, if you find out who he is, let me be the first to know.”

“Thanks, Rivalz.”  

The sarcasm was lost on Rivalz, who beamed at him openly, and Lelouch almost felt guilty. Almost. “No problem.”

And perhaps that would have been the end of it, except that just as Lelouch was just pulling his binder out of his bag, Rivalz mentioned the Halloween party that Saturday.

The party was at an off-campus residence that, according to Rivalz, belonged to Rivalz’s friend Gino. Gino’s family were spending the weekend out of town, so Gino had done the obvious thing. Lelouch had not particularly wanted to go, preferring to stay cooped up in their room with Karl Marx. Plus, to be honest, Lelouch hated parties; he was used to them, but they brought back bad memories. But Rivalz had insisted, telling him that he needed to go, to “meet someone” and “stop being such a gloomster”. Pitted against Rivalz’s good-natured insistence, Lelouch did not have much of a choice in the matter. He managed to resist Rivalz’s insistences that he go in costume, opting for clean-cut black jeans and a sweater instead.

They rolled up in Rivalz’s friend Brandon’s blue jalopy, packed knee-to-knee in the back with six other boys like sardines. They were all boisterous, meatheaded, heterosexual. Lelouch felt terribly out of place; the average neck in the car seemed to be thicker around than his own thigh. In spite of how irritatingly well-put-together Brandon himself was, his car was literally falling apart. Unbeknownst to any of them— except Brandon, who wouldn’t notice for about a week— the bumper fell off halfway through the ten-minute drive, with a thunk followed by one collective “what was that?” It was agonizing. Rivalz abandoned Lelouch to talk to his other friends, whom he saw less often. Their conversation itself was a language Lelouch didn’t understand.

The party was audible two miles out from the isolated farmland property, and it was like an out of control high school get-together. Gino’s house was decorated for Halloween. College kids holding red solo cups drooled out of the front door of the house and onto the lawn, dregs hanging back to cling to the porch in thick clumps. Girls in cut-off shirts and boys with slicked-back hair bumped and grinded to the thrum of the bass speakers that rumbled the turf even outside. Lelouch carefully navigated around a couple licking each others’ necks as he and Rivalz fought their way into the entrance.

“You know, this actually doesn’t really look like my scene,” Lelouch said.

“What?” yelled Rivalz. Lelouch’s words were totally lost under the heavy music.

“I said, this doesn’t really look like—” Lelouch yelled, but then a white girl wearing a feather headdress, drinking from a red cup on the stairs, shot him a glare. He withered under it. “Never mind.”

Lelouch was just following Rivalz at this point. They awkwardly walked past a group of people playing with a pink plastic Ouija board with the lights on. Why were they going into the kitchen? Maybe because there were less people in there. Maybe Rivalz did know Lelouch better than Lelouch thought. “See? I told you everyone and their dad would be here,” Rivalz said, both leaning close and shouting in order to be heard. “Well, maybe not the dads, they tend to be party crashers.” Rivalz clapped his hand on Lelouch’s shoulder. “Actually, I have a surprise for you.”

The kitchen was low-lit and pulsing, like an animal’s insides. Everything was washed in pale oyster-blue. The fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered out of tune to the driving music, never enough to pitch the room into total darkness but enough that the light seemed untrustworthy.

In the center of the room, a thin crowd of students flanked a boy in a white hoodie who looked like a neatly-groomed pile of snow, a boy who sat with his arms folded over his chest, cross-legged on the floor in front of a bizarrely specific array of various containers of different types of alcohol. Circling him, purring, was a calico cat, presumably belonging to the owner of the residence, but temporarily lending its services as a feline familiar, its tail weaving in and out of the necks of the bottles.

The boy’s flyaway hair was a halo in the bright kitchen lights, and was smiling bigger and bigger at a buck-toothed frat boy in a neon green hat who was being dragged away from him by his friends, slurredly contesting his loss. Slowly, Lelouch realized that this was the boy who’d helped him to the nurse’s office at the start of the year. The boy raised his eyebrows and nodded, turning his head to the side. Lelouch realized that he never had gotten his name.

Electricity passed between them. The knowledge of their shared experience rocked back and forth between their eyes, a series of seismic waves.

“Hey,” said Lelouch. He was not aware of it, but he was smiling.

Suzaku had been winning the beer chess tournament in the kitchen, and he looked every bit as haughty as Lelouch felt about his own chess-playing abilities.

Lelouch wanted to say _it’s nice to see you again_ or _hi, I’m Lelouch, your name is ...?_ or maybe even _thank you for saving me_ if he was feeling particularly demure. But Every Time We Touch was playing and he had to be economical with language, so he just said “Explain this arrangement to me” as he sat on the floor.

In a room full of people wearing masks, they were the only two without. It was a little bit awkward; celebration had stickied every surface in the house. But who was even the usually finicky Lelouch to complain, when his savior was right here in front of him, with such a challenging look on his pretty face?

“Regular rules,” Suzaku told him. “Light beers are the white team, the rest are black.” (Lelouch snorted.) He lifted up each drink as he explained its relation to the pieces in the game. “And the board—“ he spread his arms, gesturing at the green-and-white checkerboard pattern of the linoleum.

Lelouch also noted, at this point, that his opponent sounded rather sober for someone who’d just played through several games of beer chess, and this should have been his first warning sign. But, where he came from, Lelouch had been incumbent chessmaster from age seven, and he was liable to fall prone to the genius-trap of overestimating his own abilities.

A less generous narrator might even have called him cocky.

“Oh,” said Suzaku, and he raised one finger in a wait, I forgot something important gesture. Then his face split into a dazzling grin. “And every time you move a piece, you have to drink.”

Despite his profligate experience with alcohol, Lelouch was still physically a total lightweight and beer chess was thus a terrible idea. To make matters worse, he wasn’t paying full attention during the opening, and by the time he realized it might have been a good idea to do so, he was already losing. No matter what he did, his opponent’s expression remained unchanged, focused, and unreadable. In fact, Lelouch realized, the other boy hadn’t looked at him even once since explaining the rules to him at the start of the game. He’d saved all of his attention for the board, which was exactly what you were supposed to do, but which in this particular case irritated Lelouch for some reason.

  


Frowning, Lelouch wondered if a surrender would be wise. He didn’t know any of the people standing around watching him lose, and just as he was weighing the tactical pros and cons on his reputation of a cowardly surrender versus a humiliating defeat, Suzaku took his bishop.

“Shit, what the hell,” he blurted out, then clamped his mouth shut, not liking how the alcohol wore down his usual brain-to-mouth profanity filter. Someone snickered; Lelouch ignored them. “Okay, my turn.”

“You’re not even really doing anything,” Lelouch’s opponent interjected, and suddenly, finally, looked at Lelouch. His eyes were green, Lelouch noted with surprise and wonder, a brilliant, hypnotizing shade of green. “You seem like you’ve played before, but it’s like you’re trying to lose. Why?”

There was a wolf whistle from somewhere in the crowd— which, Lelouch foggily noticed, was growing. “Damn, Kururugi,” a voice in the audience jeered. Suzaku did not respond. He kept his flat expression trained on Lelouch, waiting for an answer. Lelouch’s anger flared, indignation raising his hackles into the curve of a furious smile.

 _Of all the impudent little…_ “Oh, you’ll figure it out sooner or later, sweetheart,” he said, blood boiling under his skin, and when he moved his piece, he leaned forward on one arm and slammed it onto the floor.

That got Suzaku’s attention. Lelouch had always been an excellent wielder of the bluff, and for a single, magical moment, he had what he wanted: the other boy’s expression as it was briefly caught off guard, vertiginous and bright. This, combined with the humiliation he’d just been made to suffer at his opponent’s callous, analytical hands, decided it: he would do his damndest to turn this game around, he would win and he would win decisively.

What followed was less like a typical endgame of chess and more like a tango of two intellects; bluffing and bravado, daring moves made in fierce, bold strokes. Before long, Lelouch could see that the game was too far gone, and, though it achieved nothing in the end, resorted to stalling tactics out of a sense of pettiness. Suzaku finally isolated Lelouch’s king in a corner of the board and started closing ranks.

“You know, you were really about to turn the game around at the end there,” Suzaku said. “Check.”

Lelouch moved his king. “Is this the part where you gloat?”

“No. I’ve decided you’re interesting, actually. Mostly because you haven’t answered any of my questions. Who are you?” Clink. “Check. Your move.”

Lelouch felt his body flash warm from something other than alcohol. “Be quiet, I’m trying to think.”

But at that moment the cat, which for most of the game had retreated to the countertops, suddenly leapt down and, in one fell swoop of decidedly unfelinian clumsiness, knocked over, with a wonderful crash, nearly every piece in the game. A choric “Oh, shit!” sounded through the room, followed by the scrambling of drunken college students for paper towels. “Ah-ha!” yelled Lelouch (who was drunk by this point), throwing both arms up into the air in triumph. In the chaos that surrounded the two of them, Suzaku stared blankly at the ruined game, blinking in shock. “I win by default.”

“What? No!” said Suzaku. Despite himself, he was grinning. “You owe a rematch.”

“Nuh-uh. Didn’t you hear what I just said?” He spoke slowly, in intent to hide the effect that the alcohol had on him, but the result gave his words a rich, deliberate timbre he couldn’t have predicted. “Pay attention,” he said, and then he was crawling. Suzaku swallowed; Lelouch was crawling, actually crawling, in black skinny jeans and a sky blue sweater that hung off his shoulder, throwing his clavicle into a visible shadow, this beautiful stranger, this devilishly intelligent, insanely attractive young man had, for whatever reason, fixed his eyes on Suzaku’s and was slinking toward him through a pool of liquor across Gino’s kitchen floor—

“Hey, can one of you drunk bastards help clean up, maybe?” asked a bespectacled girl with cropped brown hair, crouching down to mop up beer from the floor with an armful of floral paper towels. “This is your mess.”

“Yes, ma’am—”

“Excuse me, it’s not our mess, it’s the cat’s mess,” Lelouch interjected, crossing his arms with just enough genuine indignation to keep things interesting. “If anyone’s cleaning up, should be her.”

Suzaku’s head whipped to face Lelouch. “You don’t speak for the both of us. I speak for the both of us.”

A pause.

“You owe a rematch.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“You know what? You owe me your name,” Lelouch said. “You owe telling me. Telling me what your name is.”

“Well,” Suzaku said, standing up and offering Lelouch his hand. “Why don’t we find somewhere quieter first? I can barely hear you in here.”

The catacombs of the large and unfamiliar house proved an ordeal to navigate while intoxicated, and the two found nearly every room in it to be occupied. At one point, when they stopped in a gameroom for Suzaku to take off his hoodie (to reveal a plain, tight-fitting dark green t-shirt underneath), complaining that it was too hot, and briefly got tangled up in it, Lelouch wondered if all hope of finding a quiet place for conversation was lost. They eventually settled on an out-of-the-way powder room tucked away behind a study in a quieter corner of the house.

There was a celadon vase, a sprig of artificial foliage (plastic lilies) that Lelouch pushed out of the way as he used all of his manpower to pull himself up onto the counter. Suzaku asked him if he thought it’d be bad karma to lock the door, and Lelouch shrugged, and Suzaku decided against it and joined him. The two boys sat on either side of the sink as if on bleachers at a football game, and yet it was still so cramped that their noses were centimeters apart.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Suzaku said. “You wanna try someplace else?”

“No,” Lelouch whined. He grabbed onto Suzaku’s shirt. “Don’t wanna walk.” Plus the party was starting to make him anxious— a little too familiar— but no need to mention that.

Static raced across Suzaku’s skin where Lelouch touched him. He laughed, honest, light, clear. “Okay. We don’t have to.”

“You saved me,” Lelouch blurted out.

Suzaku’s face flushed redder than it already was. “I just did the right thing. Anyone would have.” He cringed at his memory. “I’m so sorry I bumped into you.”

Lelouch shrugged. “I wasn’t looking where I was going,” he offered. Which was true, but Suzaku wasn't either. “Plus I hadn’t really been eating. What’s your name? Do you go to Ashford?”

“I’m Suzaku. Suzaku Kururugi,” Suzaku said. Lelouch smiled; he liked the sound of the name. “And yeah, I do. And you?”

“I’m Lelouch,” said Lelouch. “I can’t believe I haven’t seen you around. I’ve been looking for you. What’s your major?”

“Biology.”

“Oh God, you’re a STEM major.”

Suzaku laughed again. “Terribly sorry to disappoint you, Your Majesty. I want to be a vet.”

“A veterinarian?”

Suzaku smiled softly. “I really love healing. I don’t trust myself to save human lives, so I decided I’m going to work with animals, instead. Plus I’m pretty good with animals, and I really love cats, even if they don’t particularly like me.”

Lelouch frowned. “You could save human lives.”

“I’m not smart enough.”

“You are super smart. You’re the first actually smart person I’ve talked to at this school."

This made Suzaku laugh for some reason, and Lelouch, still drunk, was about to continue protesting when Suzaku asked gently, “What do you like to do?”

Lelouch made a thoughtful sound. The person he lived for— his life’s purpose— had died in a fire almost a year ago, actually. But there was one other thing. “I like to write,” he said slowly. He was admitting it aloud for the first time. It was true. There was a reason he’d made off with a suitcase full of his own old journals, why he’d chosen English for his major, why he was happier buried in stacks of dusty books than doing pretty much anything else. “Poetry mostly, but… also stories.” He shifted a bit on the counter. “I always thought maybe I could write a novel one day.” He laughed at the idea, as if it were silly.

“That’s so cool,” Suzaku breathed. “I wish I was creative. The only thing I’m any good at is running track.”

“It’s not that cool,” Lelouch said, but he was smiling. Then he frowned. “Wait, if the only thing you’re good at is running track, what on earth possessed you to become a veterinarian?”

It was Suzaku’s turn to laugh. “I’m dumb as a rock, but apparently even rocks can learn through brute force.” He lifted up the hem of his t-shirt, flashing Lelouch the plastic case of index flashcards he kept clipped to his belt. “I take these bad boys with me everywhere.”

“Suzaku,” he said. He paused, letting the name sink into the air. He liked how it felt in his mouth. “You are not as dumb as a rock.”

“Am too.”

“You just almost beat me at chess, in case you forgot.”

“Kinda kicked your ass at chess, actually.”

“Exactly, and— hey!”

Suzaku was smiling and so was Lelouch, and their knees were touching on the counter and the air was charged with electricity. Something in the moment changed what was between them, added a new layer to it, as if by the pulling of a switch, and suddenly Suzaku was a boy with strong, warm hands and a gentle mouth, Lelouch a boy with soft, nimble fingers and sinful lips. Lelouch, living the life he once had, had never felt this way before simply because he’d never had the opportunity, and he didn’t understand what was happening, but Suzaku had and did, and Suzaku was leaning in closer and closer and closer.

Lelouch racked his brain. “Do I have something on my face?”

And here it should be affirmed that Lelouch and Suzaku then came to what we in the business of tragic plots refer to as A Misunderstanding. Lelouch, having little experience by way of someone kindly and gently trying to kiss him, had no means by which to recognize such an occurrence on his own, and Suzaku, unaware of what was going on inside Lelouch’s head, assumed that Lelouch not following his romantic lead meant he was rejected, and was subdued.

So it went.

And they did not kiss in the powder room that day; but as the party waned around them and they finally stumbled out into the weak early-morning light (“Jesus Christ, did we talk all night?”), they did get each other’s phone numbers, and this resulted in routine Saturday dates at the campus café, over the period of the next few months leading up to winter break, to sip coffee and chase each other around a chessboard.

Now that he was actually putting his (full, unintoxicated, liberally caffeinated) mind to it, Lelouch began whipping Suzaku’s tail with a regularity he prided himself on, and he himself expressed this to him one such afternoon over a caramel macchiato. It was the week before finals, and their meetings would soon have to be postponed in favor of studying, so they were trying to make the most of them.

However, on this particular day, a petite, button-nosed girl named Anya, a chemistry major with whom Suzaku shared several of his classes, had tagged along at his elbow. For some reason, Lelouch found himself irrationally jealous of her no matter what she did, which was remarkable, considering how she did almost nothing aside from snapping pictures on the model of iPhone everyone would be using this time next year.

“It’s like you don’t even try for me anymore,” Lelouch remarked wistfully, resting his chin on his delicate knuckles. “Check.”

Well, yeah, maybe sometimes Suzaku was letting him win a little. He was cute, after all. “More like you just started taking me seriously,” Suzaku joked. But mostly it really was that Lelouch was devastatingly smart, and the fact that Suzaku was more focused on having fun than winning whenever they were together. Sometimes he would move a piece in a way that was completely out of left field, just to see how Lelouch would react. He moved his king. “Uh, there, I’m not in check anymore… I think?”

“Actually, you still are,” Lelouch said, pointing out how. Suzaku swore.

Anya tapped him on the shoulder. “Sorry, Lelouch,” she said, “Suzaku and I need to talk. Right now. In the bathroom.”

It was one of those unisex, single-toilet type bathrooms; Anya locked the door behind them.

“Okay, buddy,” she said. “I was led to believe we were studying today. Now you’re going to explain to me why, instead of that, you’re sitting out there, mentally eating ass.”

There was a snap and a flash and before Suzaku could even process what had happened, Anya was tucking the disposable camera she carried around with her back into her purse. “Sorry,” she said. “Your face was too good.” 

Meanwhile, Suzaku had short-circuited. “Anya,” he started to yell. Anya put her finger up to her lips and shushed him. “Inside voice,” she somehow managed to whisper at a speaking volume.

You could see Suzaku waffling. “His name’s Lelouch.”

“Why aren’t you jumping his bones? Unless you are. But I don't think you are.”

“I think he’s straight.”

Anya’s eyebrows leapt up into her hair.

“I tried to kiss him at a party,” Suzaku explained. “He wasn’t interested.”

“That’s why you think the guy sitting out there in pink chinos is straight? It’s December.”

Suzaku stared off into space with a fond expression. “He really should learn to dress in-season.” He blinked, then refocused his gaze onto Anya. “Listen, he’s not gay for me, is the bottom line, alright?”

Anya looked at him miserably. “You’ve got it bad, kid.” She then took a long, disinterested slurp from her chocolate frappe, forcing Suzaku to wait for her to speak. She knew he hated when she did this. He knew she knew. “Is that why you’ve gone on a not-date with him every Saturday for three months now? Like pretty much every single Saturday? And why you spend all of your time not on Saturdays with him as well?”

Just as Suzaku opened his mouth, there was a light tapping of knuckles against the bathroom door. “Excuse me?” came Lelouch’s voice through the door. “Is everything alright? I heard shouting.”

“We’re fine!” Suzaku shouted.

Suzaku turned back around and grabbed Anya by the shoulders. “Listen,” he said, his tone hushed and I-am-so-serious-right-now. “I like him as a friend. He likes me as a friend. We share a lot of values, and I enjoy having someone to talk to every now and then who’s smarter than, like, a potato.” Anya looked wounded. “I meant Gino. You’re extremely bright. You know what I mean.”

“I don’t. So what? You’ve been friendzoned?”

“He is my friend. And we’re going to leave it at that. And, not to be rude, I’m sorry, but also you’re going to not mess this up for me? Please? Please.”

“When have I ever messed up anything for you.”

“Please?”

“I won’t meddle,” she said, sounding annoyed. “I’ll leave first. You can collect yourself.”

Suzaku meant to ask her what she meant by that, but the door was already closing behind her, and when he turned around and saw himself in the smudged half-wall mirror he didn’t have to anymore. He was shaking. He could see the white all around his eyes; he looked crazy. He put his hand on the sink, steadied himself.

It was Kansas, it was a rural school, it wasn’t a place Suzaku felt safe wearing his bisexuality on his sleeve. If Anya had already sussed him out, who else had? But his meetings with Lelouch almost always left him in this state afterward, or at least one near it. Jesus. He’d never felt this way about anybody. He counted to ten and tried to think of something he wanted more than to impress Lelouch. To get his degree? That counted, right? That wasn’t cheating? It kind of felt like that was cheating.

When Suzaku came back, he found the competitive atmosphere subdued. He and Lelouch gave up moving pieces around the board to just talk, the way many of their meetings ended. This was Suzaku’s favorite part; he could listen to years of Lelouch’s take on current events, what he was reading for class, what he was reading outside of class, the goddamn weather. Everything Lelouch thought was so interesting, and even though Suzaku’s perspective on some of the issues Lelouch brought up was different, he was still able to understand Lelouch’s point of view, and their core values were always aligned.

This did not prevent them from arguing; they did quite a bit of that, but somehow none of their arguments made one like the other any less. Suzaku also did his fair share of talking, but he tried not to dominate the conversation because he thought that whatever he had to say couldn’t be nearly as interesting as what Lelouch did. The joke was on him, of course; Suzaku was the first person outside of Lelouch’s family that Lelouch had ever clicked with, and he lived to hear Suzaku talk on the weekends like a prisoner lives for bread.

The boys were enjoying themselves. Anya bought a vanilla bean scone, went to a corner table, and sat there gnawing on it. It was cold and grey outside, and little pellets of rain were starting to thunk against the glass. Lelouch felt lucky to be here, in the warm, with Suzaku.

“So,” said Suzaku. “I need to take a couple of humanities courses for my degree.”

“Right.”

“They want me to be well-rounded.”

“Of course.”

Suzaku wrapped his lips around his straw, didn’t actually sip his drink, pulled back as if thinking. He wondered if Lelouch could sense how sweaty his palms were. He hoped not. “I was wondering what classes you were interested in taking, next semester.”

Lelouch cocked an eyebrow. “You’re suggesting we take a class together?”

“Maybe.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes.”

Lelouch smiled. Good! Suzaku was doing something right! Thank God! He was going to regret this so much.

“There’s a multicultural American literature class that’s supposed to be open to non-majors as an elective,” he said. “We’d be reading some books and discussing them.”

“That sounds great, actually,” said Suzaku. “So we’ll both try to sign up for it when registration time comes?”

“Yeah, I’d like that,” Lelouch said.

That night, taking off the dirt from the day in the bath of his and Rivalz’s room, although he should have just been happy that he and Suzaku were taking a class together, Lelouch couldn't help but remember the scene at the coffee shop, how Anya had pulled Suzaku right off into the bathroom with no embarrassment to her name. Lelouch found his cheeks flushing from more than just the hot steam that filled the room with the turning of the knob. Suzaku had never mentioned a girlfriend, and had certainly never referred to Anya that way, but Lelouch couldn't think of anyone else that would be so important to Suzaku that he would bring her along when it was supposed to be just him and Lelouch.

Or maybe they have an even naughtier relationship, an evil voice in his brain whispered as he stepped into the shower, and he shivered at the thought. Lelouch's life up to this point had been… strange, and as a result there were a lot of concepts most people his age took for granted that he barely understood, but the basic idea of friends with benefits was not foreign to him. He remembered how panicked Suzaku had sounded when he knocked on the bathroom door. What if they'd snuck away to… to kiss and touch and stuff?

From there the fantasy was easy to construct. So easy, in fact, that it did so by itself, in Lelouch's mind, totally unbidden, despite Lelouch's very own determination not to think about it and to instead scrub himself with body wash. The fantasy had very little to do with Anya and very much to do with Suzaku, Suzaku's face as Anya worked down his neck, Suzaku’s voice making helpless little sounds of pleasure… Suzaku's eyes, glassy as they would be when he opened them—

Lelouch whined, looking down to confirm what he felt between his thighs. He was hard. Okay. He was going to have to touch himself, because it was not going away on its own. Okay. He spread his legs underwater, wrapped a hand around rigid flesh, and had to swallow a moan at the sheer relief of the feeling, pressing the back of his other hand to his lips to keep himself quiet.

He had to think about it. What would Suzaku be like when he was feeling good? Would he ever cry out? Would his hips stutter, pressing up against his partner's, wordlessly begging for more? Lelouch moaned softly, stifled it with the back of his hand. What one could do to Suzaku given a room alone with him and enough time, the chance to explore his powerful body, to pull him apart with desire. The scent of soap filled Lelouch’s lungs as he tilted his head back in delicious agony, pumping himself harder and faster without even meaning to.

God. God. This felt so good, and he'd barely even started. Maybe he'd been curious about Suzaku's strong body like this since the beginning, and he just hadn't been aware of it. Maybe ever since their thighs had touched through their jeans on that counter at the party. He wanted to take his hand off his mouth and cry out openly. Even with his hand pressed firmly over his mouth, he was starting to lose control of his voice, trapping the little whimpers in the air so he swallowed them back down. He was getting close. He could feel it coming in his stomach. Usually it took Lelouch pretty long to get off, but he'd barely been going at it for two minutes when what sent Lelouch careening over the blissburnt edge was imagining himself as the one above Suzaku, not Anya.

Lelouch didn’t want to sit in his own mess. He drained the tub and turned the shower on, and lukewarm water rained down, washing milkily away the evidence of what he’d just done. Which, he thought miserably, was what, exactly?

In Suzaku’s dreams they were kissing, Lelouch’s weight on Suzaku’s lap, humming with pleasure or as if in thought, Suzaku’s pulse thrumming in his ears. Suzaku would lay him out on beds, on patio benches, on the chess table right on front of everyone and just kiss the hell out of him, make him tangle his fingers in his hair, gasp against his lips when their mouths came apart. They kissed in Suzaku’s car over the stick shift and they kissed in the tall grass where no one could see, and dream Lelouch pulled his shirt up when Suzaku asked so Suzaku could leave rose petal love bites on his pale stomach, Lelouch stifling the sounds his mouth made against the palm of his hand.

He kissed Lelouch until Lelouch forgot whatever it was that made him look so haunted sometimes when they talked, kept Lelouch anchored so he didn’t float away to that lonely place in his own head, or at least made sure Lelouch was too preoccupied to think of it, of anything but how it felt as Suzaku trailed kisses down Lelouch’s neck, every single gesture, even the occasional bites, intimate and laced with the harsh scraping affection that burgeoned in Suzaku’s chest whenever the other boy was around.

 _You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met._ Kiss. _You drive me absolutely crazy sometimes, but I love it._ Kiss. _I like myself better when I’m with you._ Kiss. _I always have fun whenever you’re around._ Suzaku imagined Lelouch’s nipples as a soft coral pink, pebbling when he swiped a thumb over them or brought his mouth down to suck. In one particularly debauched fantasy they did it in the school library, surrounded by other students with their noses in their books none the wiser, even though Suzaku’s mouth was on Lelouch’s mouth, Suzaku’s hands up under Lelouch’s shirt. Please, whimpered the dream-Lelouch in his ear so sweetly, and Suzaku reached under the table and rubbed him through the seam of his jeans until he went still and shuddered and came, and Suzaku woke up to a mess he’d made.

Sometimes the dreams would dissolve like cotton candy in water when Suzaku reached down and felt that Lelouch was hard, or felt his hardness against his stomach or thigh. Sometimes, when Suzaku touched it, Lelouch would just moan and kiss him harder, and once, Lelouch smirked, pulled back, made quick work of Suzaku’s pants and underwear, and sucked Suzaku’s cock. (Suzaku woke up from that dream with sticky sheets too, groaned and rolled over, thinking about laundry.)

But most of the time the dreams, when they did progress past kissing, were about Suzaku making himself at home between Lelouch’s legs, going to town on making Lelouch feel good. Suzaku had only ever been with girls before, and he was considerate; as a lover he’d learned patience, attention, how to put his partner’s pleasure before his own. It aroused Suzaku to think of making Lelouch feel good, and sometimes the fact that his own pleasure would be delayed as a result just fueled the desire even more. He loved making Lelouch think. He wanted to make Lelouch come. He thought about it every time he touched himself, and he touched himself as often as Gino’s absence allowed.

Finals were finals, and the remains of the semester trickled away like gutter water. For break Suzaku returned to NYC, spent Christmas vacation putting up lights around his mother’s apartment and making her coffee before she woke up. She was delighted to have her son home, and he regaled her with tales of his new school, leaving out his more risqué adventures and wrapping the G-rated ones in fresh, tinselly detail. He wanted to make his mother happy, wanted her to feel like she’d made the right choice in sending him off to school so far away, and he did just that; Akiko Kururugi was a proud mother, her chest inflated with boasts for her coworkers.

Just because he’d left out his sultry fantasies did not mean Lelouch was erased from Suzaku’s storytelling entirely. Indeed it would have been extremely difficult to do so; even though they weren’t yet studying side by side, the boys were spending more and more time together, comparing class schedules, sneaking out to walk in circles around campus. They would theorize out loud about what justice meant, or how to best define happiness, or what art was, and although Suzaku professed not to know, Lelouch wrote in his journal what Suzaku said he thought art was (“a shot fired into the dark that hits”).

They would skip stones across the sea of grass that cradled up their hidden prairie world and because Suzaku had never been made to study the Greek myths in high school, Lelouch would point to constellations and tell him stories that he’d read in a dusty old volume he’d smuggled home when he was eleven and hidden under a loose floorboard under his bed, contraband as all literature was in his home. He’d told the exact same stories to Nunnally years ago, but because he’d then been fenced in by mountains, he’d never known just how wide the sky was. Sometimes his eyes prickled with tears while he spoke, and Suzaku put his hand on his shoulder and squeezed.

All that was difficult to explain. So Suzaku told his mother about the boy named Lelouch and not his beautiful, pale skin or his naturally midnight-dark hair or deep, scrutinizing eyes, which to the best of Suzaku’s knowledge were violet but which burned almost scarlet in the dim evening light, the fiery red of New England autumn leaves. He told her about the conversations they had and perhaps it laced his voice how lovesick he was or perhaps he hid it well and it was merely a mother’s intuition, but Akiko knew her boy was in love before the new year. She did not judge him, but she said nothing. To her reasoning, perhaps even Suzaku did not realize yet that he was in love, and pushing him would have no good consequence.

Like her son, Akiko Kururugi was simple and kind. It was what she had it in her to be. She sent Suzaku back off to school with another cheek kiss, and a promise to tell her everything that happened in the coming semester as well. Like many people, her kindness would one day swallow her whole.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check out the full-res, unedited version of the illustration for this chapter, by [Sam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/insanity_ecstasy/pseuds/insanity_ecstasy), [here!](https://i.imgur.com/ln39vUj.jpg)
> 
> If you'd like fic updates, more Code Geass ramblings, to get to know me, or say hi, I spend most of my time on [Dreamwidth](https://killdoll.dreamwidth.org/) these days. You can leave comments on Dreamwidth even if you don't have an account, so don't hesitate to say hi!


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